Sunday, August 19, 2012

I finished this painting a few months ago but have waited until now to post it because it was a commission for a CD cover. The musician I did it for, Jeff Goebel, had a release party for this CD this past weekend. I met Jeff a number of years ago in Anaheim at the NAMM convention. NAMM is a convention for the music industry and is a really amazing show to attend. We hit it off pretty well and soon Jeff and I and our wives were vacationing in Florida. While there, he mentioned that he was thinking of making his own CD and asked if I could paint him a cover. I agreed and several years later here it is.

The painting went through a ton of changes along the way. The original ideas were nothing like the finished painting. We both have a strong interest in the space program, so the basic theme was easy to do. One thing I wanted to try to do with this was show the sound of music. Since you can't hear music in space and this was a music CD is seemed like that was something that should come across with the art.

This painting is painted pretty thin for me, especially compared to my plein air work. It was a lot of fun to do this and a nice change of pace from all the landscape work. It brought me back to my comic book roots a little bit, so it is a bit of an illustration rather than fine art. It came out unexpectedly cool as many of the things in this I had other ideas for. I'd start going in one direction and Bam!, something else would pop out. I tried to keep as much of that as possible and toward the end I just let those little things happen without attempting to change them.

Jeff's 'group' for this is called Project Gemini and the Space Donkeys. Jeff plays guitar (and lots of other instruments) and he 'borrowed' band mates from other bands to help contribute parts. The music is modern instrumental rock in the vein of Joe Satriani-Steve Vai-George Lynch and is pretty kick ass stuff. I know it was a ton of work for Jeff and I'm glad that he finished and released this CD. You can get it and/or listen to samples on iTunes, Amazon.com and on his Facebook page. Tell Jeff I sent you there!